Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War

PROLOGUE

In the early hours of April 7, 1862, after the terrible first day of the Battle of Shiloh, Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman came through the darkness to where his superior, Major General Ulysses S. Grant, stood in the rain. Sherman had reached the conclusion that the Union forces under Grant’s command could not endure another day like the one just ended. When the massive Confederate surprise attack on the vast federal encampment beside the Tennessee River began at dawn on April 6, Grant’s command had numbered thirty-seven thousand men. Now seven thousand of those were killed or wounded, another three thousand were captured, and more than five thousand were huddled along the bank of the river, demoralized and useless as soldiers. Sherman, who had been wounded in the hand earlier in the battle, was coming to tell Grant that he thought they should use the transport vessels near them at Pittsburg Landing to evacuate their forces so that they could put the river between us and the enemy, and recuperate.

Sherman found Grant alone, under a tree. Hurt in a fall from a horse on a muddy road a few days before, Grant was leaning on a crutch and held a lantern. He had a lit cigar clenched in his teeth, and rain dripped from the brim of his hat. Looking at the determined expression on Grant’s bearded face, Sherman found himself moved by some wise and sudden instinct not to mention retreat and used a more tentative approach. Well, Grant, he said, we’ve had the devil’s own day of it, haven’t we?

Yes, Grant said quietly in the rainy darkness, and drew on his cigar. Lick ’em tomorrow though.

That was the end of any thought of retreat. At first light, Grant threw his entire force at the Confederates under General P.G.T. Beauregard, and after a second bloody day, Grant, with Sherman right beside him, had won the biggest Northern victory of the Civil War’s first year. The author and Confederate soldier George Washington Cable wrote, The South never smiled after Shiloh.

Shiloh was a great victory in itself, but that meeting in the rain symbolizes something more. Enormous military and political results flowed from the friendship between Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, two men who had been obscure failures before the Civil War. Their relationship as superior and subordinate began when they moved toward the Battle of Shiloh, which took place ten months into the conflict. At Shiloh they came together on the field, and here Grant and Sherman took each other’s measure under fire and began two years of successful cooperation and friendship. They separated in the final year of the war to lead armies in different areas, but though their headquarters were hundreds of miles apart, they remained in virtually constant contact by what was then known as the magnetic telegraph. Throughout the war, each supported the other’s efforts in every way; each furthered and on occasion saved the other’s career.

In some ways the two men were different. Grant, whom a fellow officer described as plain as an old stove, was reserved in manner and worked with decisive inner power. A man who knew Sherman described his torrential energy: He is never quiet. His fingers nervously twitch his whiskers … One moment his legs are crossed, and the next both are on the floor. He sits a moment, then paces the floor.

Sherman was an intellectual, widely read in military history and theory. Early in the war, Sherman, greatly talented but insecure, asked President Abraham Lincoln to agree that he would remain as second in command in a specific assignment and not have to lead it. By contrast, Grant operated on military intuition, thinking boldly and acting with quiet confidence: another officer said that Grant looked as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it. (As Grant advanced into Confederate territory, Abraham Lincoln said of him, When Grant once gets possession of a place, he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.)

Grant needed a gifted and effective subordinate, and at first Sherman needed a man to give him orders and then stand by him, no matter what. And each needed a friend. They worked together for twenty-three months, planning, consuming countless cigars, learning the lessons taught them by their battles and campaigns.

At that point, in March of 1864, Lincoln summoned Grant east to assume command of all the Union armies and to oppose Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia during the final year of the war. Before they parted, Grant and Sherman agreed on what each had to do next. Grant would attack Lee in northern Virginia, working to outflank Lee until he could break through Lee’s extended and continually thinning lines. Sherman would march southeast from Chattanooga, Tennessee, disemboweling the South.

Turning that strategy into action, Grant’s forces and Sherman’s Army of the West supported each other as effectively as if the two men had remained together. By then the two leaders thought alike, and any differences they had were quickly resolved.

After Grant came east to take the Union supreme command, he and Sherman did not meet again for a year. When they did, it was Sherman who traveled north on a swift courier vessel from his successful Carolina campaigns to meet Grant at City Point, Virginia, prior to a conference with Lincoln concerning what all three knew would be the closing scenes of the war. As Grant walked down the dock to where Sherman was coming ashore, one of Grant’s staff witnessed this:

In a moment, they stood upon the steps, with their hands locked in a cordial grasp, uttering words of familiar greeting. Their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war tragedy.

Soon after that conference at City Point, Grant forced Lee’s final defeat at Appomattox Court House, and in North Carolina Sherman brought to an end the resistance of the South’s other remaining large army under Joseph E. Johnston.

Grant and Sherman learned the lessons that led to the final victory during many desperate hours in dramatic campaigns. Those who believe that the North’s greater industrial strength and manpower guaranteed the South’s eventual defeat forget that those well-equipped Union columns had to be led by generals. The North had other good generals besides Grant and Sherman, as well as many that Lincoln tried in various areas who failed, but the partnership between these two leaders was unique. Grant and Sherman’s way to victory required intelligence, luck, and brave soldiers, but it was built on the mutual trust that their friendship inspired.

1

TWO FAILED MEN WITH GREAT POTENTIAL

In December of 1860, five months before the Civil War began, two men who had resigned from the United States Army earlier in their lives reviewed their respective situations.

From Galena, Illinois, a small city of fourteen thousand, four miles east of the Mississippi River and just south of the Wisconsin border, the first of these men, former captain Ulysses S. Grant, wrote a friend, In my new employment I have become pretty conversant … I hope to be made a partner soon, and am sanguine that a competency at least can be made out of the business.

A man who had graduated seventeen years before from the United States Military Academy at West Point, something that in itself conferred a certain prestige and social status, Grant was now a clerk in his stern father’s small company, which operated a tannery as well as leather goods stores in several towns. Just six years previous, after four years as a cadet and eleven as an officer, including brave and efficient service during the Mexican War, his military career had come to a bad end. Stationed at remote posts in California without his wife and two children, Grant became bored and lonely. During the long separation from his wife, Julia, a highly intelligent, lively, affectionate woman who adored him as he adored her, he began to drink. In 1854, when Grant was thirty-two, his regimental commander forced him to resign from the army for being drunk while handing out money to troops on a payday.

Returning to Missouri, Grant struggled for four years to support his little family by farming land near St. Louis that belonged to his wife and father-in-law. Despite working hard, avoiding alcohol, and remaining optimistic—at one point he wrote to his father, who then lived in Kentucky, Every day I like farming better and I do not doubt money is to be made at it—events worked against him. A combination of weather-ruined crops and falling commodity prices left him with with one slim chance to get by. Hiring two slaves from their owners, and borrowing from his father-in-law a slave whom he later bought and set free, Grant and his new field hands began cutting down trees on the farm, sawing them into logs, and taking them to St. Louis to sell as firewood. Sometimes Grant brought his logs to houses whose owners arranged for deliveries, and on other days he peddled them on the street.

Wearing his faded old blue army overcoat, from which he had removed the insignia, he sometimes encountered officers who knew him from the past. Brigadier General William S. Harney, resplendent in a new uniform as he passed through St. Louis to campaign against the Sioux, saw Grant handling the reins of a team of horses pulling a wagon stacked with logs. Harney exclaimed, Why, Grant, what in blazes are you doing here? Grant answered, Well, General, I’m hauling firewood. On another day, an old comrade looking for Grant’s farm asked directions of a nondescript man driving a load into the city, only to realize that he was speaking to Grant. In response to his startled, Great God, Grant, what are you doing? he received the laconic reply, I’m solving the problem of poverty.

On December 23, 1857, Ulysses S. Grant pawned his gold watch for twenty-two dollars to buy Christmas presents for Julia, who was seven months pregnant, and their three children. Nothing improved: bad weather destroyed most of the crops Grant planted in the spring of 1858, and a freak freeze on June 5 finished off the rest. During the summer, the Grants’ ten-year-old son Fred nearly died of typhoid. In early September Grant wrote to his sister Mary that Julia and I are both sick with chills and fever.

The end had come for Grant as a farmer. In the autumn of 1858, an auctioneer sold off his remaining animals, crops, and equipment. He, Julia, and their four children moved into St. Louis, where a cousin of Julia’s had been persuaded to make him a partner in his real estate firm. Grant’s job was to collect rents and sell houses, but even in a sharply rising real estate market, he could not make money. After nine months he was told that the partnership had been dissolved: he was unemployed. Next, after being turned down for the position of county engineer for lack of the right political connections, he found a job in the federal customshouse but was replaced after a month, again a victim of political patronage. Heavily in debt and behind in his rent, Grant could not support his family. A friend who saw him walking the streets looking for work described a man shabbily dressed … his face anxious, sunk in profound discouragement. Finally Grant turned in desperation to his austere father, who had earlier rejected his appeal for a substantial loan, and the elder Grant created a job for him as a clerk at the leather goods store in Galena. A man who ran a jewelry store across the street recalled this, from the time when Grant was describing himself as pretty conversant with his new job. Grant was a very poor businessman, and never liked to wait on customers … [He] would go behind the counter, very reluctantly, and drag down whatever was wanted; but hardly ever knew the price of it, and, in nine cases out of ten, he charged either too much or too little.

That was Grant as he lived in Galena on the eve of the Civil War—an ordinary-looking man of thirty-eight, five feet eight inches tall and weighing 135 pounds, somewhat stooped and with a short brown beard, a quiet man who smoked a pipe and by then had some false teeth. He had never wanted a military career: he went to West Point only because his autocratic father, who had gotten him a congressional appointment to the academy without consulting him, insisted that he go. While he was there, Congress debated whether to close the nation’s military school, and Grant kept hoping that would happen. In studies, he said, I rarely read over a lesson a second time, but he devoured the library’s stock of novels, including the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Washington Irving, and demonstrated skill and sensitivity in the paintings and pen-and-ink sketches he executed in a drawing course.

When Grant arrived as a plebe, seventeen years old, another cadet, a big, swaggering youth named Jack Lindsay who was the son of a colonel looked at this quiet and unassuming boy who then stood only five foot one and weighed 117 pounds, and mistook Grant’s politeness for weakness. Lindsay disdainfully shoved Grant out of line during a squad drill. Grant asked him to stop. Lindsay did it again—and learned a lot about Ulysses S. Grant when this little plebe knocked him to the ground with one punch.

The incident may not of itself have ensured his acceptance and popularity, but Grant became a member of a secretive group known as the T.I.O., standing for Twelve in One, a dozen classmates who pledged eternal friendship and wore rings bearing a symbol whose significance only they knew. In the evenings, he and his friends sometimes played a card game called Brag. His classmate Daniel Frost, who was destined to become a Confederate general, described him:

His hair was reddish brown and his eyes grey-blue, We all liked him, and he took rank soon as a good mathematician and engineer … He had no bad habits whatever, and was a great favorite, though not a brilliant fellow.

He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, dance. He had no facility in conversation with the ladies, a total absence of elegance, and naturally showed off badly in contrast with the young Southern men, who prided themselves on being finished in the ways of the world.

In one area only, Grant stood first, in the entire corps of cadets: horsemanship. From childhood on, he always had this intuitive relationship with horses. At home, he broke them for their owners, trained them, and rode them masterfully. The villain of the West Point stables was a big, strong sorrel named York, who terrorized any cadet assigned to ride him by rearing in the air and then tumbling backward onto the rider. Grant asked the dismayed riding master for permission to work with York; when that was granted, Grant hit the horse on the top of the head twice with the butt of a pistol and began patiently showing the animal what he expected of him. A candidate for admission to West Point who was walking around the academy described the eventual results of Grant’s long work with York, which he saw when he happened upon the part of the graduating class’s final exercises that took place in the riding hall. After various mounted drills performed for the audience of parents and dignitaries and other guests,

the class, still mounted, was formed in line through the center of the hall. The riding master placed the leaping bar higher than a man’s head and called out Cadet Grant! A clean-faced, slender, blue-eyed young fellow, weighing about one hundred and twenty pounds, dashed from the ranks on a powerfully-built chestnut sorrel horse, and galloped down the opposite side of the hall. As he turned at the farther end and came into the stretch at which the bar was placed, the horse increased his pace and measuring his stride for the great leap before him, bounded into the air and cleared the bar, carrying his rider as if man and beast had been welded together. The spectators were breathless.

During Grant’s four years at West Point, some cadets, when they had a free hour, would go to the riding hall just to watch Grant school York and the other horses. In one event, Grant and York cleared a bar placed so high that their performance set an academy record that stood for twenty-five years.

Grant’s roommate in his last year at West Point was Frederick Dent, a cadet from St. Louis. When newly commissioned Lieutenant Grant was assigned to the Fourth Infantry Regiment stationed at Jefferson Barracks, a few miles south of St. Louis, his friend Dent urged him to call on his family at White Haven, the large nearby farm to which the prosperous Dents annually moved from their winter house in St. Louis to spend much of the rest of the year. White Haven was not one of the great Southern plantations, but it had twelve hundred fertile acres situated on the broad Gravois Creek. In addition to the white-painted main house with its traditional big porches running along both the ground floor and the bedroom floor above it, all covered with honeysuckle and other vines, there were eighteen cabins in which the Dent family’s slaves lived. The Dents’ daughter Emma later described the place:

The farm of White Haven was even prettier than its name, for the pebbly shining Gravois ran through it, and there were beautiful groves growing all over it, and acres upon acres of grassy meadows where the cows used to stand knee-deep in blue grass and clover … The house we lived in stood in the centre of a long sweep of wooded valley and the creek ran through the trees not far below it … Through the grove of locust trees a walk led from a low porch to an old-fashioned stile gate, about fifty yards from the house.

Emma was six years old when Lieutenant Grant came to call at this rural scene on a day when her eighteen-year-old sister Julia was away on a long visit to St. Louis. She described their first meeting: I was nearing my seventh birthday, that bright spring afternoon in 1843 when, with my four little darky playmates, Henrietta, Sue, Ann, and Jeff, I went out hunting for birds’ nests. They were my slaves as well as my chums, for father had given them to me at birth, and as we were all of about an age, we used to have some good times together. This day, I remember, we were out in front of the turnstile and I had my arms full of birds’ nests and was clutching a tiny unfledged birdling in one hand when a young stranger rode blithely up to the stile.

In answer to this man on horseback’s How do you do? Does Mister Dent live here? Emma was speechless. I thought him the handsomest person I had ever seen in my life, this strange young man. He was riding a splendid horse, and, oh, he sat it so gracefully! The whole picture of him and his sleek, prancing steed was so good to look upon that I could do nothing but stare at it—so forgetting the poor little thing crying in my hand that I nearly crushed it to death. Of course, I knew he was a soldier from the barracks, because he had on a beautiful blue suit with gold buttons down the front, but he looked too young to be an officer.

When Emma recovered herself enough to answer Yes, sir, after the lieutenant asked for the second time if this was the Dents’ house, this scene ensued:

We children followed him up to the porch, trailing in his wake and close to his feet like a troop of little black-and-tan puppies … At the porch we heard him introduce himself to my father as Lieutenant Grant. Then my mother and sister Nellie came out to meet him … My own contribution to the entertainment of the stranger was one continuous stare up at his face … His cheeks were round and plump and rosy; his hair was fine and brown, very thick and wavy. His eyes were a clear blue, and always full of light. His features were regular, pleasingly molded and attractive, and his figure so slender, well formed, and graceful that it was like that of a young prince to my eye … When he rode up to White Haven that bright day in the spring of 1843 he was pretty as a doll.

Grant came to call several times, always urged to stay for supper by Mrs. Dent, who liked him immediately. Of the slender lieutenant’s quiet political discussions with her husband, she commented, That young man explains politics so clearly that I can understand the situation perfectly. Emma and her fifteen-year-old sister Nellie began to regard him as a gift that had somehow been bestowed upon them. Then their vivacious older sister Julia, who had recently turned nineteen, came back from St. Louis. She was not exactly a beauty, Emma said, mentioning that one of Julia’s eyes would go out of focus in a condition known as strabismus, but she was possessed of a lively and pleasing countenance. Grant suddenly began to ride over from the barracks every other day. It did not take Nell and myself long to see that we were no longer the attractions at White Haven, Emma noted. Having grown up on a big farm with three older brothers as well as her three younger sisters, Julia loved the outdoors. He and she frequently went fishing along the banks of the creek, and many a fine mess of perch I’ve seen them catch together. Julia’s impression of her new friend Lieutenant Grant was that he was a darling little lieutenant.

An excellent rider, Julia had a spirited Kentucky mare. According to Emma, Lieutenant Grant was one of the best horsemen I ever saw, and he rode a fine blooded animal … Many a sharp race they used to have in the fine mornings before breakfast or through the sunset and twilight after supper.

White-haired Colonel Dent—a courtesy title by which many men of his station in life were then known in the South, regardless of military experience—could be a peevish man, given to sitting by himself on the porch reading a newspaper and puffing on a long reed-stemmed pipe, but he, like his wife, believed in having many young guests. Grant was encouraged to bring his brother officers with him. There were picnics and dances around the countryside; one of the young officers always included was a handsome giant named James Longstreet, a cousin of Colonel Dent’s who had been known at West Point as Pete.

When Julia’s pet canary died, Grant organized a funeral for the bird. Julia remembered that he was kind enough to make a little coffin for my canary bird and he painted it yellow. About eight officers attended the funeral of my little pet.

It seemed not to occur to this young couple that they were falling in love. At a time when Grant was home on leave visiting his family in Ohio, his regiment was ordered to Louisiana to become part of the Army of Observation during the annexation of Texas, in the confrontation that would lead to the Mexican War. An officer friend told Julia that if Grant did not appear at White Haven by the following Saturday, it would mean that he had gone straight on down the Mississippi from Ohio to catch up to his regiment and would not be at the Barracks again. Julia later wrote: Saturday came and no Lieutenant. I felt very restless and, ordering my horse, rode alone towards the Barracks … I halted my horse and waited and listened, but he did not come. The beating of my own heart was the only sound I heard. So I rode slowly and sadly home.

Grant was in fact hastening toward St. Louis from Ohio, where, on learning that he was about to be sent far from Julia for a long time, he discovered that there was something serious the matter with me. When he arrived at Jefferson Barracks, the post was virtually deserted, with his friend Lieutenant Richard Ewell finishing the last of the departed regiment’s paperwork before following the unit down the Mississippi. Ewell readily wrote out a few days’ extension of Grant’s leave, and Grant found a horse and set out for White Haven that evening. Normally the Gravois Creek was shallow, but a placid stream was not what he encountered that night: On this occasion it had been raining heavily, and when the creek was reached, I found the banks full to overflowing, and the current rapid. I looked at it a moment to consider what to do. One of my superstitions has always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished … So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I being carried down by the current. With Grant hanging on to the horse’s mane as the animal swam through the foaming water in the darkness, both horse and man reached the opposite bank. When he arrived at White Haven, drenched and dripping, little sister Emma was right there, and her memory for such matters later enabled her to render this account of that moment:

We all enjoyed heartily the sight of his ridiculous figure with his clothes flopping like wet rags around his limbs, and none laughed more heartily than my sister Julia. Lieutenant Grant took it all good humoredly enough, but there was a sturdy seriousness in his usually twinkling eyes that must have suggested, perhaps, to Julia that he had come on more serious business, for the teasing did not last long. [Older brother] John carried him off to find some dry clothes, and when he returned the usually natty soldier looked scarcely more like himself … John was taller and larger than Grant, and his clothes did not fit the Lieutenant soonenough.Of course, this roused more laughter, which the soldier took in the same good part, but those rosy telltale cheeks of his reddened, as usual with him when the inward state of his feelings did not agree with his outward composure.

Grant held his fire until a day soon thereafter when several of the Dents set off to attend a friend’s wedding, with Grant included in the group. He arranged matters so that he and Julia were alone in a buggy, with him at the reins. As they approached a little wooden bridge across the still-turbulent Gravois, which had a torrent of water roaring just beneath the wooden planks, Julia began to worry about the safety of crossing.

I noticed, too, that Lieutenant Grant was very quiet, and that and the high water bothered me … He assured me, in his brief way, that it was perfectly safe, and in my heart I relied upon him. Just as we reached the old bridge I said, Now, if anything happens, remember I shall cling to you, no matter what you say to the contrary. He simply said All right and we were over the planks in less than a minute. Then his mood changed.

As Julia put it, he used her statement about clinging to him to ask her to cling to him forever. Grant’s only recorded comment on his proposal was, Before I returned I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks … Before separating it was definitely understood that at a convenient time we would join our fortunes, and not let the removal of a regiment trouble us. Julia told her Ulys, as she had taken to calling him, not to ask her father for her hand in marriage just then; she was his, but she did not want an engagement to be announced.

During the next four years, the couple saw each other only once, when he returned from Louisiana on a brief leave before his regiment was sent into the Mexican War. On that visit, he received Colonel Dent’s permission to marry his daughter, despite the colonel’s dislike of what he knew of the conditions that army wives often encountered. From Mexico, Grant sent Julia letters that expressed great longing for her. Telling her of the American victory at Matamoros early in the war, he wrote, In the thickest of it I thought of Julia. How much I should love to see you. His short, clear descriptions of the battles in which he fought mentioned little of his own part in them. In fact, young Lieutenant Grant participated in most of the major engagements. At the Battle of Monterrey, as his regiment advanced through city streets in house-to-house fighting, Grant’s commander realized that his men were running out of ammunition. Someone had to ride back through streets swept from one side by enemy fire with the order that more ammunition be brought forward immediately. Believing that whoever tried to carry this message would probably be killed, the colonel asked for a volunteer. Grant swung up on a gray mare named Nellie and put his arm around the horse’s neck and a foot over the hind part of the saddle. Then, hanging down along the side of the horse away from the enemy, he galloped back through the street crossings, which, he said, I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under the cover of the next block before the enemy fired.

Serving at times as regimental quartermaster, a position calling for attention to supplies and transportation at the rear of the fighting, Grant did all that in superior fashion and still repeatedly fought at the front. He was to say, I never went into a battle willingly or with enthusiasm … was always glad when a battle was over, but his friend Longstreet saw a different picture: You could not keep him out of battle … Grant was everywhere on the field. He was always cool, swift, and unhurried … as unconcerned, apparently, as if it were a hail-storm instead of a storm of bullets. Among the officers in the thick of the fighting was Julia’s brother Fred, Grant’s West Point roommate. At Molino del Rey, Grant came upon Fred, who was in another regiment, minutes after his future brother-in-law was wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. He was soon able to write Julia that Fred would recover quickly.

On the day before General Winfield Scott’s victorious entry into Mexico City, Grant distinguished himself in the attacks made along the aqueduct road leading toward the complex of buildings and defenses on the city’s outskirts known as the Garita [city gate] San Cosme. He repeatedly took different kinds of initiatives. Grant moved forward on his own, actually working his way around an enemy breastworks until he was behind the Mexicans who were firing at the Americans. Returning to the American lines, he asked for volunteers and got twelve men. Grant led them, and an American company he came upon that was just entering the battle, back around to the side of the enemy position, attacked the Mexicans on their unprotected flank, and forced a retreat. When the numerically superior enemy reoccupied the breastworks later in the day, Grant’s Fourth Infantry led the American counterattack that finally won it back: another lieutenant reported that he and Grant were the first two persons to gain it.

As if that were not enough for the last afternoon of the war, Grant, scouting on his own again, found a church off to the south of the road, which looked to me as if the belfry would command the ground back of the Garita San Cosme. Once again, Grant trusted his instincts: he rounded up an officer in command of a mountain howitzer and its crew, and directed them as they wrestled the small cannon up the steps of the bell tower. When they opened fire on the Mexican soldiers who were behind walls where they thought they could not be seen, The shots from our little gun dropped in upon the enemy and created great confusion.

The commander of this wing of the American attack, Brigadier General William Worth, was studying the enemy position through a spyglass. This sudden successful development surprised him as much as it did the Mexicans. He sent his aide Lieutenant John C. Pemberton to bring Grant to him. Telling the gunners to keep up the fire, Grant reluctantly left the bell tower and reported to General Worth, who congratulated him, saying that every shot was effective. He ordered Grant to take a captain with another mountain howitzer and its crew back with him, and get it up in the tower to double the fire.

I could not tell the General, Grant said of that moment in which he combined military obedience and common sense in the middle of a hard-fought battle, that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant. I took the captain with me, but did not use his gun.

By nine the next morning, General Scott entered the center of Mexico City and walked into the National Palace accompanied by a group of his officers. After a last uprising and enemy effort to reenter the city that was quelled within twenty-four hours, the fighting in the Mexican War came to an end. Grant wrote Julia that the highly professional American forces had won astonishing victories, but added, dearly have they paid for it! The loss of officers and men is frightful. Twenty-one officers of the Fourth Infantry Regiment, many of them guests at the merry picnics and dances held near White Haven, and some who had attended the funeral Grant organized for Julia’s pet canary, had been sent from Jefferson Barracks to Mexico. Seventeen of them died there. In all, 78,718 American soldiers served in the Mexican War; 13,283 died, a higher percentage than in any other conflict in which the United States has been engaged. As for Grant’s view of the war, he later termed it one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. That was Grant, in essence: he might disagree with his nation’s policy, but he had sworn to carry it out.

So, after varying lengths of time serving in the army of occupation, the men who would have to choose between fighting for the North or South thirteen years later began coming home. There were officers clearly marked for future high command, such as Robert E. Lee, whom Winfield Scott called the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field, and the two unrelated Johnstons, Joseph E. and Albert Sidney, who would also side with the South. George Gordon Meade, Winfield Scott Hancock, and John Sedgwick had gained important experience that they would use in fighting for the Union. Other men received notice: at the climactic moment of the Battle of Chapultepec, Lieutenant George Pickett, the future Confederate general whose division would be slaughtered as part of the doomed Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, pulled down the Mexican flag that had been flying over the bravely defended Military College and hoisted an American flag. In the same battle, an artillery lieutenant from Virginia named Thomas Jonathan Jackson, later known as Stonewall, managed to advance his cannon so far up Grasshoppers Hill in the face of intense musket fire that his gunners finally left the gun and hid behind some rocks. The tall young warrior with blazing gray eyes strode back and forth as bullets cracked past him, shouting to his crouching men, There’s no danger! See, I’m not hit! In the final house-to-house fighting in Mexico City, Lieutenant George B. McClellan, who early in the Civil War would be the Union Army’s general in chief, saw a Mexican kill an American sergeant; grabbing the sergeant’s musket, McClellan killed the Mexican.

The talk in the army right after the Mexican War was that, of the junior officers, the one destined to rise highest was Don Carlos Buell, followed by George H. Thomas and Braxton Bragg. No one mentioned Ulysses S. Grant, although he had not only learned battlefield tactics during the bloody and demanding campaigns, but, fully as important, had mastered his regiment’s complicated problems of supply and transportation.

When at the end of the war Grant returned from Mexico to claim his bride, his face, as Julia’s sister Emma saw it, was more bronzed from the sun, and he wore his captain’s double-barred shoulder straps with a little more dignity than he had worn the old one[s], perhaps. His shoulders had broadened some, and his body was stouter, and it may be that he had grown a little more reserved in manner. They were married at the Dents’ house in St. Louis, with Julia’s cousin, Grant’s West Point classmate Lieutenant James Longstreet, acting as best man.

Grant’s parents were not there: simple, spartan folk, they would have felt uncomfortable at this small but elegant wedding; besides that, Grant’s father, Jesse, was opposed to the concept and practice of slavery, and his son was marrying into a family that owned slaves. (Grant seems to have been indifferent to the issue at this stage in his life, and there is no record of letters or discussions on the subject between father and son at just that time.)

Ulysses and Julia spent the beginning of their honeymoon aboard what Julia called one of those beautiful great steamboats, going to Ohio so that Julia and his parents could meet. Our honeymoon was a delight, Julia recalled. We had waited four long years for this event and we adjusted to one another like hand to glove. Julia had never traveled outside the vicinity of St. Louis and had never been on a passenger vessel. I enjoyed sitting alone with Ulys … He asked me to sing to him, something low and sweet, and I did as he requested. I do not remember any of the passengers on that trip. It was like a dream to me. Their visit with Grant’s parents was a success: insofar as Jesse and Hannah Grant could be charmed by anyone, Julia succeeded.

After nearly four years of happy married life, during which the young Grants lived at army posts in upstate New York and in Michigan, in the spring of 1852 his Fourth Infantry Regiment was ordered to California. At that time Ulysses and Julia had a two-year-old son, Frederick Dent Grant, and she was due to have another baby in July. The route the Fourth Infantry was to take involved boarding a ship in New York to make the voyage to Panama, and at that time, long before the Panama Canal was built, this had to be followed by an overland trip across the often disease-ridden isthmus to the Pacific, with the final long leg on another ship to San Francisco. Despite their deep desire to stay together, the Grants decided that the risks to Julia and their son and unborn child were too great, and that he must start serving this lengthy tour of duty alone.

On his regiment’s harsh journey to California, Grant’s hard-won knowledge of logistics, developed as a supply officer during the Mexican War, briefly made him an unsung hero. His position as regimental quartermaster gave him the responsibility of drawing up and executing the plans for moving seven hundred soldiers, plus a hundred of their wives and children, across the Isthmus of Panama at a time when there was a cholera epidemic; it killed nearly a third of them. The toll would have been higher had it not been for Grant’s energy and willingness to take the initiative. The army had authorized Grant an allowance of sixteen dollars, per mule, to rent the beasts of burden to carry women, children, equipment, and what had been assumed would be a few sick persons. Finding no mules for rent at that price during a mounting crisis, Grant cast aside the bureaucracy’s rules, hired mules at double the price, and, burying along the way the men, women, and twenty young children who died, got the survivors to Panama City. There the sick were separated and sent to a vessel, anchored well out in the harbor, that Grant leased for a hospital ship. For two weeks, as more died all around him, Grant remained aboard, arranging for food, medicine, and care. A witness to his efforts said that Grant emerged as a man of iron, so far as endurance went, seldom sleeping … His work was always done, his supplies ample and on hand … He was like a ministering angel to us all.

During his first few months in California, Grant received none of the letters Julia sent him and felt their separation deeply. When a letter came, in which Julia had traced the outspread hand of their new son, Ulysses, whom he had never seen, Grant proudly showed the drawing to a sergeant at his post and then, as he turned away, began silently shaking, tears in his eyes. The sergeant said of him, He seemed always to be sad. After eighteen lonely months, he applied for orders that would take him back east. On February 6, 1854, writing Julia from Fort Humboldt, a remote post 250 miles north of San Francisco, he said, A mail came in this evening but brought me no news from you nor nothing in reply to my application for orders to go home … The state of suspense I am in is scarcely bearable. Grant had already begun to drink. One of his fellow officers observed:

He was in the habit of drinking in a peculiar way. He held his little finger just even with the … heavy glass bottom of the tumbler, then lying his three fingers above the little one, filled in whiskey to the top of his first finger and drank it off without mixing water with it. This he would do more or less frequently each day.

Others described him as a man who seldom took alcohol, but went on sprees when he did. In any event, his drinking led to the payday when he was drunk while handing out money to the troops. Grant’s colonel offered him the choice of resigning from the army without further explanation, or facing court-martial charges of being drunk while on duty. His West Point classmate Rufus Ingalls described what happened then: Grant’s friends at the time urged him to stand trial, and were confident of his acquittal; but, actuated by a noble spirit, he said that he would not for the world have his wife know that he had been tried on such a charge. He therefore resigned his commission and returned to civil life.

As soon as Grant was back with his beloved Julia and their sons, his drinking ceased, despite the struggles to make a living that he experienced in the years before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

While Ulysses S. Grant sat bored in his father’s harness and leather goods shop in Galena at the age of thirty-eight, as the collision between North and South grew imminent, 750 miles to the south of him another West Pointer who had left the army as a captain, William Tecumseh Sherman, was reaching a dead end in one more of the careers he had tried since resigning from the service a year before Grant did.

The forty-year-old Sherman was failing dramatically, and this brilliant, nervous, ambitious man felt the frustration and insecurity that marked many phases of his life. When he was nine and living in Lancaster, Ohio, his father, a respected judge of the state’s Supreme Court who was honorably paying off a large debt instead of declaring bankruptcy, suddenly died, leaving his wife and eleven children nearly penniless. Relatives and family friends offered to have the older children live with them, and off they went. He was taken into the handsome big house, a hundred yards away, of Thomas and Maria Ewing, a prominent lawyer and his wife who were raising four children and two nieces and a nephew, all of whom had always played with the young Shermans. When Ewing, a self-made man who stood over six feet tall and weighed 260 pounds, walked in with his new foster son, his pretty brown-haired daughter Eleanor, aged five and always called Ellen, somehow understood that she and this red-haired boy from next door were now going to be raised as brother and sister. I peeped at him with great interest, she said. Twenty-one years later they would become husband and wife.

Living in his new home, the boy found that Thomas and Maria Ewing treated him as if he were one of their own children, and yet he always had the feeling of being different. His own mother and youngest brothers and sisters remained in his old house just down the hill, and he frequently ate there. Thomas Ewing had no thought of having the youngster change his name from Sherman to Ewing, but his wife, Maria, was a staunch Catholic and insisted that this new member of her family be baptized. Near the beginning of the christening ceremony the priest asked the nervous boy’s first name, and learned that it was Tecumseh, Tecumseh Sherman—a name given him by his late father, who admired the great Indian chief—and nothing else. The priest pointed out the need to add a Christian saint’s name, stated that the day was the Feast of Saint William, and baptized him as William Tecumseh Sherman.

When young Sherman was taken to Mass, the service meant little to him, but he felt other influences strongly. Two years after he entered the family, the Ohio legislature named his foster father to the United States Senate. Thomas and Maria Ewing believed that their children should work hard at school, they expected success in life for themselves and their entire family, and they tried always to be well-informed (when Senator Ewing was in Washington, his letters home, read to all the children, described dinners at the White House with President Andrew Jackson and conversations with Vice President John C. Calhoun).

Besides these influences, life had instilled some fears in young William Tecumseh Sherman. He had a horror of debt—as he saw it, if his father had not died owing so much money, he and his brothers and sisters would all still be living together with their mother. This feeling about debt extended to a dislike of being dependent on others. He also knew that the family from which he sprang had a history of mental disorders: his maternal grandmother and uncle both spent time in what were then called asylums. This produced a conflict: he needed friendship and love but felt that his world might betray him—fathers died, debts were presented, people became sick in all sorts of ways—and that he could rely only on himself. He yearned for the serenity of his early childhood, but those years would not return. Occasionally rebellious, he was untidy, and his mind leapt from one subject to another, but, in a near guarantee of future frustration, he wanted the world to be a predictable, well-behaved place.

As Cump—a nickname derived from Tecumseh—grew into a gangly, beak-nosed, animated youth, a teenager with a high bulging forehead, a pitted complexion, and a shock of coarse red hair, Thomas Ewing began to think about his foster son’s future. A United States senator has the power to make appointments to West Point: at the age of seventeen, Sherman entered the Military Academy, one of 119 plebes. He excelled in his studies, graduating sixth among the forty-two who completed the four years. (He would have been fourth but for a heavy total of demerits for minor offenses that ranged from holding parties in his room after lights-out to chatting in ranks while on parade.)

In Sherman’s last year at the academy, one of the entering plebes was a Cadet Grant, also from Ohio, who was to have his own problems about his name: his real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but the congressman who appointed him mistakenly sent his name in as Ulysses S. Grant, and Grant was told that could not be changed. Whenever anyone thereafter asked what the S in his name stood for, Grant answered, nothing, but Sherman recalled how Grant came by the nickname Sam.

I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board, where the names of all the newcomers were posted. I ran my eyes down the columns, and saw there U.S. Grant. A lot of us began to make up names to fit the initials. One said United States Grant. Another Uncle Sam Grant. A third said Sam Grant. That name stuck to him.

Graduating from West Point in 1840, Sherman was sent to Florida and joined the campaign against the Seminole Indians; despite serving ably and conscientiously, he experienced none of the hit-and-run fighting that defined this guerrilla war. Subsequent postings took him to a fort near Mobile, Alabama, and to Fort Moultrie, at Charleston, South Carolina. His time with the hospitable and charming citizens of Mobile and Charleston, combined with a brief visit to New Orleans, left him with a great affection for the South. Short assignments to places such as Marietta, Georgia, gave his retentive mind the opportunity to study territory that he would one day revisit under circumstances he would then have considered unthinkable.

In 1846, the Mexican War came; 523 graduates of West Point fought in those battles, many distinguishing themselves in ways that influenced future assignments and promotions, but despite his efforts to get into this second war in six years, Sherman was ordered to duty in California. He served there first as a supply officer and later in various assignments as aide to commanding officers, combining this with responsibilities as an adjutant in charge of paperwork. Writing to Ellen Ewing, to whom he was now engaged, he expressed his reaction to the impressive American victories in Mexico: These brilliant scenes nearly kill us who are far off, and deprived of such precious pieces of military glory. In a letter he wrote her in 1848 after the war’s end, Sherman added, I have felt tempted to send my resignation to Washington and I really feel ashamed to wear epaulettes after having passed through a war without smelling gunpowder, but God knows I couldn’t help it so I’ll let things pass.

In the meantime, a major event occurred in this California that Sherman considered such a backwater, and he was among the first to learn of it. His commanding officer at the army post in Monterey called him into his office, pointed at some glistening stones brought in by two messengers from a Swiss-born California landowner named Sutter, and asked, What is that?

Three years after graduating from West Point, Sherman had seen gold in north Georgia; remembering what he could from his mineralogy course at the academy, he tested one stone and found it so malleable that he could hammer it flat. They were looking at large gold nuggets. The California Gold Rush began. Men of every description left their jobs, heading for the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada to hack through rocks and pan streams in hope of making their fortunes: sailors abandoned their ships; farmers threw aside their